I recently came across a requirement where I needed to read SamAccountName and some ExtensionAttributes from Azure AD which are synced with On-Premise AD. I thought since all the On-premise attributes are being synced using Azure AD Connect, it should be easy enough to read those values from Azure AD using PowerShell or Microsoft Graph APIs. Getting Started Before I jumped into the solution, I wanted to be sure that Extension Attributes are indeed being synced. So, I looked into the connector properties and it was clear at that at least some of the Extension Attributes are being synced. Let […]

License assignments has been one of the core governance concerns in Office 365 . With ever growing list of Office 365 Services and mix of license types (like E1, E3, E5 and a combination of those), this has created another world of processes (and PowerShell scripts) to keep up. So, what can we do to help reduce the amount of efforts spent on this? Yes, you got it right, Automate! Why bother about it? Before we jump into the solution, let’s spend some time on understanding “why” it is required in the first place. In most medium to large size organizations, […]

Automatic content classification or metadata tagging has been one of the “wishes” for knowledge workers across organizations. SharePoint has provided a solution for Managed Metadata and manual tagging for long and some third party solutions exist which claim to provide automatic keywords extraction from the content of the uploaded documents. In this article, we will explore how can we use Azure Text Analytics Service to Automatically Tag Documents stored in SharePoint from the keywords extracted from the content of those documents. So, let’s’ get started. Prerequisites Before we can jump in to extract keywords from SharePoint documents, we need to setup […]

A few days ago, I wrote articles about Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step followed by Configure LUIS application for practical use in Azure bot and Create your first Azure Chat Bot with QnA Service – Step by Step. In this article lets explore how can we create an Azure Chat Bot which can have an interactive forms flow, i.e. a bot which can accept information as if filling a form and take some action based on provided inputs like booking a flight ticket or raising a support request. Half of the steps are similar to what you might […]

Recently I was encountered with a question about implementing Google Analytics in a SharePoint on-premise environment that triggered a discussion, whether we should choose Google Analytics or look for Azure Application Insights, which is available in Azure stack. Azure was in use already since SharePoint Servers were hosted on Azure VMs and the Application Insight reports look quite impressive. I started to look into more details about what to expect from both of these. Google Analytics Lets take a look at the Google Analytics first. Google analytics is intended for website usage tracking and traffic optimization, has a nice dashboard and is […]

A few days ago, I wrote an article about Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step followed by Configure LUIS application for practical use in Azure bot. In this article lets explore how can we create an Azure Chat Bot which can respond to any questions based on a known knowledge database using Microsoft QnA Service. First of all of course you need to have an Azure subscription, you can sign up for free here. Once you have the subscription ready, go to http://portal.azure.com Step 1: Create an Azure Chat Bot Browse to New – Data + Analytics – […]

A few days ago, I wrote an article about how to Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step, Lets extend that article with additional details about how can we configure LUIS application and train it to be much more useful for practical usage.In my previous article, I covered how can we create a LUIS application. So, let’s go ahead and try to teach it a little more than “Hi and Hello” 🙂 To start with login to LUIS at https://www.luis.ai with your azure credentials. You should see the app already created (if you followed my previous article). You can […]

Hey guys, Automation and Machine Learnings are the new buzz words these days and Microsoft is leading the way. Azure Bot Service has been rolled out recently, which is currently in preview mode but has plenty of stuffs to try your hands on. In this article, I am going to explain step-by-step, how you can get started with Azure Chat Bot service using Natural Language processing. First of all of course you need to have an Azure subscription, you can sign up for free here. Once you have the subscription ready, go to http://portal.azure.com Browse to New – Data + […]

Hello Guys, In one of my recent SharePoint 2016 deployment (hosted on Azure VMs), we ran across an issue in which SQL Server 2014 managed backup was enabled for SharePoint databases. The size of all the databases combined was about 2 TB! The problem started when users started using the SharePoint application extensively, resulting in SQL transaction logs getting filled more frequently and hence SQL Managed backup triggering full backups of such databases during peak business hours multiple times. Now, whenever the backup used to get started, the communication between SharePoint server and SQL server started to show issues like […]

Lets take a look at a scenario which is getting more and more prominent with many organizations deciding to move their SharePoint environment out of their own data center to host of MS Azure VMs. This is more seen in smaller/medium size companies who completely want to do away with their data centers by moving most/all such services (like Exchange, Lync etc.) to cloud. This article is for VMs created using Classic Model in Azure, If your VMs are created using Azure Resource Manager (ARM), read this article instead Well, when running a medium sized SharePoint farm in-premise, mostly organizations […]